Related: Facial Recognition-Based False Arrest Implicates Clearview AI, Reports NY Times, CNN Interesting Story: "A False Facial Recognition Match Sent This Innocent Black Man To Jail", Fever Tablet Facial Recognition Misidentifies Teenager, Alleges Racial Profiling.
Interesting NY Times report: Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match - The New York Times
Porsha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.
Details on the match:
A woman who matched the description given by the victim dropped off his phone at the same BP gas station, the police report said.
A detective with the police department’s commercial auto theft unit got the surveillance video from the BP gas station, the police report said, and asked a crime analyst at the department to run a facial recognition search on the woman.
According to city documents, the department uses a facial recognition vendor called DataWorks Plus to run unknown faces against a database of criminal mug shots; the system returns matches ranked by their likelihood of being the same person. A human analyst is ultimately responsible for deciding if any of the matches are a potential suspect. The police report said the crime analyst gave the investigator Ms. Woodruff’s name based on a match to a 2015 mug shot. Ms. Woodruff said in an interview that she had been arrested in 2015 after being pulled over while driving with an expired license.
Face rec company is DataWorks Plus and on LinkedIn showing 60 employees:
The NY Times explains that they used an older 2015 mugshot photo of the woman falsely arrested rather than her newer driver's license photo:
Matching people by facial recognition is fundamentally difficult because (1) many people look like many other people and (2) even the same person can look significantly different depending on lighting, angle of incident, facial expression, etc. For example, at first, I wasn't sure that the two photos above were of the same person, but the NY Times says they are.
I suspect most of the time, the police make the right match, but it's really hard not to ever make mistakes with this, and when they do, the damages to the person falsely arrested can be severe.
